NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Omics firm IsoPlexis is developing an automated version of its single-cell analysis platform for use in large clinical trials of CAR-T therapies for blood cancers.

The Branford, Connecticut-based company is using a $1.8 million grant it received this summer from the National Cancer Institute’s Small Business Innovation Research program to fund development of the automated system.

IsoPlexis plans to initially implement the automated platform at clinical trial sites around the country where researchers can use it to run the company’s single-cell cytokine panel to help identify expression signatures linked to patient response to CAR-T treatment and other re-engineered T cell therapies, said Sean Mackay, the company’s co-founder and CEO.

IsoPlexis launched in 2014 as a spin-out from the lab of Rong Fan, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Yale University. The technology underpinning the system was originally developed in the lab of California Institute of Technology researcher James Heath, where Fan was a postdoc. Heath is a director at IsoPlexis and member of its scientific advisory board.

The company’s platform uses microchips featuring arrays of thousands of microchambers which isolate individual cells from samples of interest. These chambers are then sealed with a slide patterned with